Straight to the point or all over the place

Fahrenheit 451 (2018)

It tries to update story’s world but utterly ruins the focus. The book was kind of a generic totalitarian story, with an unusual twist on it. But the first movie distilled this idea and made the world entirely coherent. Here, they burn hard-drives too, and even paintings, but all the writing is in the spirit of the original book and what they are saying doesn’t really fit with what they are doing. It’s not believable at all, so they had to introduce drugs. And at this point you can just replace “books” with “emotions” and the title with “wannabe equilibrium”. Also final act is changed and they have some very bizarre resolution to this setup.

It tries to edge SJWoos censorship, but doesn’t deliver, because of a lack of commitment. At the same time it tries to satirize the society, bringing up the emoji Shakespeare, but that doesn’t work if you have totalitarian government, also we already have the perfect Idiocracy. And they don’t play it as a proper witch-hunt either.

When they try to illustrate the importance of the books freedom of though they use Записки из подполья, which is kind of a mix between Письма к Мартину Алексеевичу and Письмо к учёному соседу from the POV of the ow the edge hikki with racists on 4chan events. And they treat it as something important and significant or as something poetic, like the Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven. Couldn’t they choose something they do understand?

The whole film tries to be stylish in its visuals, but it is incoherent and absolutely unfocused, it doesn’t know what it tries to be and lacks mastery to pull the modernization off. The whole film is built to just give Shannon a role and pile the rest around him. Also the Fahrenheit 451 itself is very outdated and immature, even just 7 years after i read the book and though it was amazing, i got myself a smartphone and mobile internet and waste more time on text than on games and movies combined. And if we start to discern which texts are worthy and which unworthy, we will be left only with the emoji Bible, emoji To the Lighthouse and emoji Moby Dick.

It’s still tolerable, even if irritating. (But my dawg gave it 3/10 without previous experience with the book or first movie.)